selection and adaptation, to make a poet. Those intimate verses which we have quoted from the Legende themselves, proceed to tell us of a passion which is stronger in him than the passion for reading. 'I reverence my books,' he says,

'So hertely that there is gamë noon

That fro my bokës maketh me to goon
But yt be seldom on the holy day,

Save certeynly whan that the moneth of May
Is comen, and that I here the foules synge,
And that the flourës gynnen for to springe,
Farewel my boke, and my devocioun !'

What he here calls May, with its birds and flowers, really means Nature as a whole; not external nature only, but the world with its rich variety of sights and sounds and situations, especially its most varied product, Man. As to his feeling for external nature, indeed, it might be called limited; it is only to the birds and the flowers, the 'schowres swote' and the other genial gifts of spring that it seems to extend. Not only is there no trace in him of that 'religion of Nature' which is so powerful a factor in modern poetry, but there is nothing that in the least resembles those elaborate backgrounds in which the genius of Spenser takes such delight. Nay, in the poet to whom we owe the immortal group of pilgrims, there is little even of that minute local observation of places and their features, that memory for the grave-covered plains of Arles or the shattered banks of the Adige, which made a part of Dante's genius, and gives such vividness to the phantom landscape of his poem. While the Inferno has been mapped out for centuries, it is only to-day, after long discussion, that our scholars are able to make a map of the pilgrimage to Canterbury. But although the distinctive sense of landscape is for the most part absent, how keen is the poet's eye for colour, for effective detail! Who but Chaucer, while avoiding altogether the inventory style of the ordinary romancer, a style on which he himself poured ridicule in his Sir Thopas, could have brought such a glittering barbaric presence before us as this of the King of Inde?

'The gret Emetrius, the King of Inde,
Upon a stede bay trapped in stele
Covered with cloth of gold diapred wele,
Came riding like the god of armës, Mars.
His cote-armure was of a cloth of Tars

Couched with perles white and round and grete;
His sadel was of brent gold new ybete;
His mantelet upon his shouldre hanging
Bret-ful of rubies red as fyr sparkling;

His crispë heer like ringës was yronne,

And that was yelwe and glitered as the sonne...

And as a leon he his looking cast.'

Or such a sketch in black and white as this first glimpse of
Creseide ?-

'Among these other folke was Creseide
In widowes habit blak: but nathëles
Right as our firstë lettre is now an A
In beautee first so stood she makëles1;
Her goodly looking gladed all the prees 2.
Nas never seen thing to be praised derre,
Nor under cloude blak so bright a sterre,
As was Creseide, they sayden everichone
That her behelden in her blakke wede.'

Or such an intense and concentrated piece of colour as his
Chanticlere?—

'His comb was redder than the fyn coral

And batayled as it were a castel wal;

His bil was blak and as the geet3 it schon ;
Like asure were his leggës and his ton*;

His naylës whiter than the lily flour,

And like the burnischt gold was his colour.'

As for the world of man and human character, it is here admittedly that Chaucer's triumphs have been greatest. In this respect his fame is so well established that there is little need to dwell on qualities with which he makes his first and deepest impression, and which moreover will be abundantly illlustrated by the extracts which follow. In his treatment of external nature, there are limits beyond which Chaucer cannot go-the limits of his time, of a more certain, a more easily satisfied age than ours. But in his sympathy with man, with human action and human feeling, his range is very great and his handling infinitely varied. The popular opinion of centuries has fixed upon the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales as his masterpiece, because it is there that this dramatic power of his, this realistic gift which can grasp at will ♦ toes.

1 without mate or peer.

2 crowd.

8 3 jet.

almost any phase of character or incident, noble or trivial, passionate or grotesque, finds its fullest scope. Other fourteenthcentury writers can tell a story (though none indeed so well as he), can be tragic, pathetic, amusing; but none else of that day can bring the actual world of men and women before us with the movement of a Florentine procession-picture and with a colour and a truth of detail that anticipate the great Dutch masters of painting. To pass from the framework of other mediæval collections, even from the villa and gardens of the Decameron, to Chaucer's group of pilgrims, is to pass from convention to reality. To reality; for, as Dryden says in that Preface which shows how high he stood above the critical level of his age, in the Prologue 'we have our forefathers and great-grandames all before us, as they were in Chaucer's days; their general characters are still remaining in mankind, and even in England, though they are called by other names than those of Monks and Friars, and Canons, and Lady Abbesses, and Nuns: for mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of nature, though everything is altered.'

It is not enough for a poet to observe, however: what he observes must first be transformed by feeling before it can become matter for poetry. What distinguishes Chaucer is that he not only observes truly and feels keenly, but that he keeps his feeling fresh and unspoiled by his knowledge of books and of affairs. As the times went he was really learned, and he passed a varied active existence in the Court, in the London custom-house, and in foreign missions on the king's service. From his life his poetry only gained; the Knight, the Friar, the Shipman-nay, even young Troylus and Constance and 'Emilye the schene,'—are what they are by virtue of his experience of actual human beings. But it is even more notable that the study of books, in an age when study so often led to pedantry, left him as free and human as it found him; and that his joy in other men's poetry, and his wish to reproduce it for his countrymen, still gave way to the desire to render it more beautiful and more true. Translator and imitator as he was, what strikes us in his work from the very earliest date is his independence of his models. Even when he wrote the Boke of the Duchesse, at a time when he was a mere novice in literature, he could rise and did rise above his material, so that one enthusiastic Chaucerian, in his desire to repel M. Sandras' charge of 'imitation servile,' flatly refuses to believe that Chaucer ever read Machault's 'Dit' at all. This indeed is too patriotic criticism; but

it is certainly true to say that Chaucer worked up Machault and
Ovid in this poem, as he worked up his French and Italian
materials generally, so as thoroughly to subordinate them to his
own purpose. The most striking instance of this free treatment of
his model is, of course, his rendering of the Troylus and the
Knightes Tale from Boccaccio. The story of Palamon and Arcite
possessed a great fascination for Chaucer, and it seems certain
that he wrote it twice, in two quite distinct forms. With the
earlier, in stanzas, which has perished except for what he has
embodied in one or two other writings, we are not concerned; but
it is open to any one to compare the Knightes Tale, in the final
shape in which Chaucer's mature hand has left it to us, with the
immense romantic epic of Boccaccio. Tyrwhitt's blunt common-
sense long since pointed out the ethical inferiority of the Teseide;
and we may point in the same way to the judgment that Chaucer
has shown in stripping off episodes, in retrenching Boccaccio's
mythological exuberance, in avoiding frigid personifications, and in
heightening the interest of the end by the touches which he adds
in his magnificent description of the Temple of Mars. In the
'Troylus' the difference between the two poets is even deeper, for
it is a difference as much moral as artistic. Compare those young
Florentine worldlings-for such they are-Troilo and Pandaro,
with the boyish, single-minded, enthusiastic, pitiable Troylus, and
his older friend who stands by to check his passionate excesses
with a proverb and again a proverb, like Sancho by the side of the
Knight of la Mancha; worldly experience controlling romance!
Compare Griseida, that light-o'-love, that heroine of the Decameron,
with the fragile, tender-hearted and remorseful Cryseyde, who
yields through sheer weakness to the pleading and the sorrow of
this sodeyn Diomede' as she has yielded to her Trojan lover!

Ne me ne list this sely womman chyde
Ferther than the storie wol devyse;
Hire name, allas! is published so wyde,
That for hire gilte it ought ynough suffise;
And if I mighte excuse her any wyse,
For she so sory was for her untrouthe,
Ywis I wolde excuse hire yet for routhe.'

'Routhe' indeed, pity for inevitable sorrow, is a note of Chaucer's mind which for ever distinguishes him from Boccaccio, and marks him out as the true forerunner of the poet of Hamlet and Othello.

To him the world and human character are no simple things, nor are actions to be judged as the fruit of one motive alone. Who can wonder if, possessed with this new sense of the complexity of human destiny, he should sometimes have failed to render it with the clearness of an artist dealing with a simpler theme? Those critics are probably right who pronounce the Troylus inferior to the Filostrato in point of literary form; but their criticism, to be complete, should add that it is far more interesting in the history of poetry.

The first of a poet's gifts is to feel; the second is to express. Chaucer possesses this second gift as abundantly as he possesses the first. The point which contemporary and later poets almost invariably note in him is, not his power of telling a story, not his tragedy, his humour, or his character-drawing, but his language. To Lydgate he is

The noble rethor poete of Britayne;'

his great achievement has been

Out of our tongue to avoyde all rudenesse,
And to reform it with colours of swetenesse.'

To Occleve he was 'the floure of eloquence,'

The firste fynder of our faire langage.'

Dunbar, at the end of the fifteenth century, speaks of his 'fresh enamel'd termës celical'; and long afterwards Spenser gave him the immortal epithet of 'the well of English undefiled.' Chaucer, like Dante, had the rare fortune of coming in upon an unformed language, and, so far as one man could, of forming it. He grew up among the last generation in England that used French as an official tongue. It was in 1362, when Chaucer was just entering manhood, that the session of the House of Commons was first opened with an English speech. Hence it is easy to see the hollowness of the charge, so often brought against him since Verstegan first made it, that 'he was a great mingler of English with French,' that 'he corrupted our language with French words.' Tyrwhitt long since refuted this charge; and if it wanted further refutation, we might point to Piers Plowman's Vision, the work of a poet of the people, written for the people in their own speech, but containing a greater proportion of French words than Chaucer's writings contain. And yet Chaucer is a courtier, a Londoner, perhaps partly French by extraction; above all, he is